The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror

by James Presley

  When criminals are sociopaths, they commit crimes without a feeling of guilt or of any sympathy for their victims and victims’ families. But all sociopaths aren’t murderers, least of all serial killers, just as all murderers aren’t sociopaths.

  A serial killer may have no conscience or a weak one.

  “The behavior of a serial killer after his capture provides some insight into his level of conscience,” write James Alan Fox and Jack Levin. “Genuine sociopaths almost never confess after being apprehended. Instead, they continue to maintain their innocence, always hoping beyond hope to get off on a technicality, to be granted a new trial, or to appeal their case to a higher level.”

  In 1988 Robert Ressler and associates, after studying thirty-six sexual murderers in depth, drew a number of conclusions that seem to relate to many other killers, including serial killers. All but seven had killed more than once. The crime held a symbolic significance to the killer, a finding possibly of importance to the Phantom case. There were sexual concerns, implied in the Phantom case. All of these factors were spurred on by fantasies turned into reality.

  Characteristics of the killers included lying, living with fantasies, school failure, poor work habits, and a preoccupation with family and personal problems. The killer had followed a long and active fantasy life that featured violent thoughts and fantasies. Before the first killing, many of the fantasies revolved around murder. Afterward, the fantasies focused on improving the murder technique, to do the next one better than the first. Their thought patterns began early in life and continued amid social isolation, functioning as an escape mechanism. As inner stress grew, the crucial step was acting out his fantasies. Thought preceded the act. The killer sees nothing wrong with what he has done, leading researchers to a conclusion that “these men murder because of the way they think.”

  A central question persists: Why did the Texarkana killer specialize in attacking and killing couples? Petty robbery hardly explains it. Holdups were common at the time, netting a wide range of proceeds; some in early 1946 may even have been committed by the Phantom. One of the females was raped but not others. If sex or robbery was not a primary motive, what was?

  The eminent psychiatrist Dr. Shervert H. Frazier of McLean Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, in a telephone conversation during which he was supplied the basic facts of the Texarkana cases, stated his opinion that the killer was troubled by a relationship in his life, one he could not enjoy. Resentment builds up. Revenge is deep in his heart. His violent reaction toward unknown couples serves as a way of getting even for his own perceived emotional injury. Seeing couples parked or at home reminds him of his lost or shattered relationship. He feels the couple is happy. He knows that he, the shooter, is not. He aims to even the score, symbolically. Though he is attacking strangers, they symbolize, in his mind, what he has lost and whom he blames. They become surrogates upon whom to inflict his vengeance. (Dr. Frazier grew up in Marshall, in northeastern Texas.)

  Though not discussed during the telephone interview, Dr. Frazier authored a paper in 1975 that seems to fit into the Phantom case, even though he was referring primarily to adolescent murderers and not serial killers. At the time, Dr. Frazier was psychiatrist in charge of the McLean Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard. “Murder is a process—not an event, but a phasic development,” he wrote, pointing out that the killer’s self-concept is deficient, leading the criminal to wreak vengeance not on his primary target but on a stand-in for his fury.

  Dr. Frazier’s paper explained that “the acting out becomes a desperate attempt at mastery, an attempt that fails. The murderer has a learning deficit that is reminiscent of the behavior of toddlers for whom each act is a new event, an attempt to learn about the self.” Still speaking of adolescent murderers, Dr. Frazier wrote that with a deficient self-concept, the killer encounters confusion, resulting in a disorganized action pattern.

  Dr. Frazier found defects in the early socialization of many murderers he had studied. The individual becomes unable to respond to emotional cues, presenting defenses that are inadequate to cope with stresses. The resulting depression leads to acting out by unleashing rage at some substituted figure of authority, which may have been the object of an earlier anger.

  “To the early adolescent, external causes are very important. The person who gets killed is substituted for the intended person.”

  To go beyond what Dr. Frazier wrote and build upon his findings, we may speculate that a violent inner drama precedes the murders and may continue even after he has “settled the score” with surrogates. What, specifically, is the relationship that spurs him to take others’ lives? It could be any relationship in his life, in or out of his family. His victims may represent parental or authority figures who displeased him or a love relationship in which he lost out to a competitor, perhaps one in which he was spurned. Possibilities are endless. His perceptions may not appear realistic to an objective observer, but to him they are paramount. They are the cause of his unhappiness and lack of success. In the Phantom case, he was poisonously resentful of the male victim, whom he killed first, and in some instances, purposefully humiliated by forcing him to pull down his pants. He may have been less angry with, or may have entertained mixed emotions toward, the female. He also seemed to take some pains to conceal her body, rather than carelessly leaving her in open view. He did not desecrate her body, suggesting some degree of respect toward her. The ages of his victims would not reflect an exact comparison with those with whom he was “getting even.” They could be younger or older. He simply found a couple approximating those he despised.

  By choosing strangers for his vengeance, the killer demonstrates his inability to deal directly with those he deems to have treated him unfairly. He is afraid to confront that person face to face, though he harbors cold anger and resentment and yearns for revenge. The ultimate revenge is to destroy. The best—perfect—model for the victim in such a case is a stranger. Neither knows the other. By killing the selected stranger the perpetrator has exacted his revenge, albeit a step removed from his primary target. On the face of it, there is no motive, unless one erroneously assigns robbery or another act as a motive, making it increasingly more difficult to identify the culprit. Thus, murder of surrogates.

  Once he has destroyed the victim or victims, he is emotionally appeased—for the time being. Other elements may enter in, including possible addiction to the rush, the excitement and power he feels in the act of killing other human beings, but he is also acting out a drama of revenge, driven by deep-seated anger that may have persisted for much of his life. While he may savor his peak moments of murder and escape from the police, in time fantasy isn’t enough. When triggering, or stressor, events occur, he sets out to kill again, to regain that feeling of excitement and power he has experienced no other way.

  In every instance, the Phantom found his preferred victims: vulnerable couples isolated, at night, helpless before a man with a gun and no scruples.

  Other psychological considerations may relate to the Phantom’s behavior.

  “Serial killers may be compensating for the inferior role they were forced to play during childhood. Killing gives them everything missing from their otherwise drab, dreary, and mundane existence,” wrote Jack Levin, who also attended the FBI symposium. “Rather than be just an ordinary person with ordinary talents and ordinary abilities, serial killers see themselves as becoming supermen who cannot be stopped by the police or the FBI. . . .

  “Taunting law enforcement is one way to feel powerful. Another is to spread fear and terror throughout a community, if not an entire nation, and become infamous in the process.”

  He added: “They want to be given a moniker—a notorious name—that will ensure that their evil deeds are permanently embedded in our collective memory, that they become a household word. . . . The press often complies by creating a moniker that is widely known—Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler. . . .”

  The media-dubbed Phant
om became a household word as he spread terror over the Four States Area, with his “achievements” heralded over the nation.

  Once started, can serial killers stop killing? Most, perhaps, may be compelled to continue, while some few do stop. The BTK killer in Wichita, Kansas killed from 1974 to 1991, then did not kill again, all the way to his arrest in 2005. He’d found substitutes for murder, apparently legal activities that somehow better channeled his needs.

  “It is not that serial killers want to get caught; they feel that they can’t get caught,” said Dr. Levin.

  Should a serial killer evade capture, will he continue to kill? The consensus is that he probably will, barring physical disability or, possibly, aging factors that would limit such high-energy crimes.

  Most authorities seem to agree that the sociopathic killer cannot be rehabilitated and once incarcerated should never be released. The offender failed to develop a conscience at the critical age and never will. Whatever his intellectual potential, he will never grow emotionally into a normal individual who is “safe” enough to re-enter society. And often, the more intelligent psychopaths will be able to discern what psychiatrists are looking for and feign the appropriate results.

  “There is no realistic way to rehabilitate a sadistic sociopath who has made a career of killing,” writes Jack Levin. “A forty-two-year-old repeat rapist or murderer doesn’t suddenly develop a conscience. He may find religion, shed tears, say all the right things, but chances are, he is no more remorseful now than he was when he raped or killed for the pleasure of it.”

  Applying the varied data and observations of a number of experts, ranging from FBI specialists to academics to clinical psychiatrists and psychologists—mostly compiled over the years since 1946—a tentative profile can be drawn of the Texarkana terrorist. He probably would be an obscure, angry, ineffectual, cold-blooded loser, a sociopath; white, at least twenty-five years old, of average intelligence and probably sexually inadequate; from a dysfunctional background, and a stranger to his victims, not a veteran of the recent war; a local resident familiar especially with the Texas side roads, who spent a lot of time driving.

  If he had experienced a string of failures, he, like Pichushkin decades later, had taken human life but remained a free man, undetected. He had committed perfect crimes. He had terrorized a region. Everybody feared him. They trembled at the mention of his pseudonym.

  He was The Phantom, publicized by the media and known from coast to coast. He was somebody at last!

  CHAPTER 15

  AN ACCIDENTAL BREAK

  Texarkanians, still occasionally jittery from the spring horrors, began to settle down. No new double attack had occurred. Three weeks, the anxiously awaited interval, passed without incident, then a month, then six weeks. If the Phantom was on a strict schedule of shooting every three weeks, something had shattered his timing. Had he moved his operations elsewhere? Maybe. Was it just too hot for him in Texarkana? Residents hoped so. They were grateful for the Texas Rangers and other lawmen covering the area. Anything to keep the hometown terrorist from striking again.

  Slowly the case faded from the front pages. Summer came with its usual sultry oppression in an era when air-conditioning was a rarity displayed only by a few downtown businesses like Kress, the 5¢-10¢-25¢ store. As the weather heated up, a few brave souls dared to open their windows at night. Most used hand fans to temper the sweltering temperatures.

  Tentatively the two sides of Texarkana eased back to what passed for normal. Couples resumed necking in lovers’ lanes, albeit more guardedly. The traumatic spring still burned deeply into the collective and individual memories. Couples kept their ears open for the odd sound, any movement outside their car. Crime and assorted violence continued much as before the Phantom’s intrusion, but none conveyed the raw terror that the serial murders had precipitated.

  Veterans resumed their interrupted lives, seeking jobs, entering college on the GI Bill of Rights. Lawmen continued their weary work. The Phantom may not have killed since early May, but he remained free. The search was still on, but there was a sea change: time to relax, if uneasily, and get on with life.

  Trooper Max Tackett, like other lawmen in the region, had his hands full dealing with routine. He had returned from the Army in late 1945 and almost immediately found himself, with his fellow trooper Charley Boyd, in the middle of the headline shootout in nearby Fulton, Arkansas.

  Tackett felt a personal responsibility for not having checked out the parked car near the Starks home the night of May 3. He believed he and Boyd would have caught the killer red-handed or possibly prevented the crimes. From then on, he was to pursue any hint of a clue.

  Before the Starks murder he had observed a pattern of criminal activity that neither he nor others fully understood, but which he found intriguing.

  While examining car-theft files for the Texarkana area, one day he compared thefts with the dates the cars had been reported stolen and when automobiles were abandoned, presumably by the thief or thieves, or recovered. Zeroing in on the dates of the Texas crimes, he correlated some of the car thefts with those weekends. Nothing unusual about car thefts. What stood out, almost like a blaring railway signal, was a connection that hadn’t been reported.

  On every night of the assaults and murders, he noted, a car had been stolen in Texarkana, and a previously stolen car was abandoned. Why? Perhaps the man who had stolen the car had used it to leave town, then had returned. Why had he returned? Were these all the actions of one man, or were they coincidences that involved several men? If one man was responsible for all of the weekend thefts, Tackett couldn’t assign a reason to the actions. Had the thief simply tired of a particular vehicle? Or was it part of a plan, not keeping a hot car long enough for it to be recognized by police? Tackett found it difficult to dismiss the relationship. It justified watching closely.

  His next challenge raised the question, why not a coincidence? With old cars wearing out and customers waiting for new models, car theft wasn’t likely to recede. Coincidence was possible, but he couldn’t dismiss the pattern so easily. Why had the cars been stolen? Obviously, for transportation. But why steal another and abandon the previous car? The thief might simply have wanted to drive a different, perhaps better, car, or he had another reason, known but to him, for ditching the old car. Tackett felt certain there was more than the surface indicated. The matter rarely strayed from his mind.

  In the latter part of June, Tackett received a routine assignment from his district supervisor at Hope. Rather than an intriguing mystery to solve, it was cut-and-dried. Jim Mays, an old farmer who lived near the new dam that was being built near Murfreesboro, a small town in Pike County, had called the state police about a man who hadn’t paid his rent. The old man was angry with the deadbeat. Several weeks’ rent money was worth complaining about.

  The district director asked Tackett to see the farmer, who was a good citizen in the community. Tackett knew the area well; he had grown up at Glenwood in northern Pike County.

  Tackett called on the farmer, who had taken down his errant tenant’s car license number. The man drove a light green 1941 Plymouth sedan. Its Arkansas license number was 61-917. His name was Youell Swinney. Tackett commiserated with the farmer, promised to start right in on the search. His quarry had previously lived in Texarkana; at the time, he reportedly lived at Delight, in a picturesque part of southwestern Arkansas near Murfreesboro and about sixty-five miles from Texarkana. At the time, construction of the Narrows Dam near Murfreesboro was under way, also not far from Delight.

  He reported the license number to the Hope office so that Milton Mosier, the state’s identification specialist, could run a check on it. The results of the license-plate check transformed the routine deadbeat complaint to another level. The car had been stolen the night of March 24, the weekend of the Griffin-Moore murders, from Wayne O’Donnell in Texarkana, Arkansas, while O’Donnell was visiting inside the Michael Meagher Hospital. Its driver was still operating it under th
e same license plate. Now Tackett was dealing with a felony.

  He, and other officers to whom he passed the information, failed to locate Swinney. He interviewed members of his family in Texarkana. They couldn’t help, either. He hadn’t been seen for a while. The family had no idea where he was and couldn’t track his movements.

  Some time later, the car was reported in the vicinity. Late one night Tackett, Charley Boyd, and deputy sheriff Tillman Johnson drove up the highway between Ashdown and Allene where the car had been sighted. They sat in the State Police car at an intersection, waiting, hoping to spot the car. They never saw it.

  A larger lead emerged, with other parts of the puzzle gradually falling into place, when the five-year-old son of one of Swinney’s family members remembered a habit of his older relative. The observant boy described a parking lot in Texarkana.

  “He always leaves the car there,” the boy said.

  Tackett checked the lot. Comparing the stolen car and license number with the others there, he found no match. But if the boy was right, the car would turn up eventually. Trooper Boyd periodically drove by the lot, looking for the stolen Plymouth. One day in late June he spotted it, compared the license tag, and surreptitiously began a stakeout.

  Boyd’s patience paid off. When a tall, slender woman in her early twenties appeared and claimed the car, Boyd stepped out and arrested her. But the man he sought wasn’t to be seen.

  Her name was Peggy Lois Stevens Swinney. It was her wedding day. She had just returned from Shreveport, Louisiana, she said, where she and Youell Lee Swinney had married a few hours earlier. She was twenty-one years old and had been a resident of Texarkana, Texas. Boyd took her to the Miller County jail until her consort could be found—and impounded the stolen car. She found temporary housing in a cell on the west side of the fourth-floor jail.